More Than Just a Facelift
It may not seem like it to an outside observer, but a good rebrand is a massive, multi-faceted effort that involves almost every department in a company.
It’s easy just to slap a new coat of paint on things or tweak a logo, but a true rebrand is an art form. While its practitioners have their individual approaches, there are some common principles that all branding experts adhere to.
Building a brand in the first place is difficult; it requires distilling the essence of your business into an identity that communicates your values to everyone. Changing that identity is no easy task.
When approaching a rebrand, there are two major questions that need answering: Why and How.
I. Why
Behind every rebranding effort is a specific goal or set of goals. It’s not enough to say that something “feels outdated” or “isn’t working”.
Brands transcend trends.
If the problem is a feeling of the brand being out of place, the first step is digging deeper and identifying why it does so. Is it an aesthetic problem? Is the brand conveying a message or personality that no longer represents the company? Is the brand failing to successfully convey that message in the first place?
These are all common struggles that you can resolve with a rebranding initiative. By taking the time to isolate the issues with your current brand, you guarantee two things:
- Precision
- Accountability
Precision is important because it affects the process itself. If your goals for rebranding are nebulous, the process for achieving it slows down because you don’t have a clear strategy. There’s no efficient path to a solution when you can’t even pin down the problem.
Accountability ensures that you can measure the success of your efforts after the fact. If you’re rebranding because you want your company to be perceived as more approachable, you can measure engagement before and after and draw clear conclusions about whether or not your rebrand was a success.
Both of these aspects of the Why boil down to information.
Rebranding is the process of making a series of informed choices about the evolution of your brand. If you don’t have the knowledge to do so, you’re not making informed decisions, you’re just making changes for the sake of it, and the results will suffer accordingly.
II. How
Knowing what problems are being solved makes it easier to plot a course toward the solution.
This stage encompasses more than just the before and after, it requires thinking about the in-between, the transition. After all, changing a brand can be a confusing, surprising event for your customers. Planning for their reaction and making sure that you transition smoothly is crucial.
With rebranding efforts focused on aesthetic tweaks to an existing brand, this might be as simple as rolling out the revised logo, changing packaging and website designs, and enforcing the new imagery across your communication channels. It’s a lot of work, but a relatively straight-forward process.
The real challenge lies in planning for bigger rebrands, where the company name changes or the brand persona evolves. This kind of situation requires a great deal of strategy to avoid alienating customers, and it’s where branding experts begin to rely on marketing campaigns, promotions, and other client-facing initiatives to help raise awareness.
Brand Evolution
To understand how brands evolve over time, it’s helpful to look at companies that care a lot about their branding and have been around for a long time, like Starbucks and Apple. These companies make perfect case studies because you can trace the evolution of their branding over the course of decades.
Let’s take a look at Starbucks, for example:
Despite the evolving aesthetic representation, the core essence of the Starbucks brand — the siren and circle — have remained intact for over 40 years. That alone is a showcase of the brand’s durability.
It’s tempting to conclude that the most recent update to the brand was the result of the changing landscape of modern design. After all, there’s been a strong push toward minimalism and flat design in recent years.
But there’s more to it than that. Starbucks wanted to establish themselves as a progressive, contemporary, and forward-thinking company. The previous logo variant had a certain vintage quality to it that no longer fit with the company’s persona.
While Starbucks used to embrace this retro coffee shop aesthetic in years past, it’s moved beyond that now. They’re early adopters of contactless payment technologies, they’re rolling out smartphone charging stations in several locations and are working hard to portray themselves as a brave and powerful role model in the industry.
Notice the absence of any text — a confident move that draws on the broad history of the logo. Everyone knows that green siren is Starbucks, there’s no need for the label anymore.
It’s the change in their message more than design trends that dictated the new logo’s appearance.
A New You
A rebrand is an adaptation. Not all companies will have to tackle one on the scale of Starbucks, but the underlying principles are the same no matter how large or small the business.
Being meticulous at every stage of the process is the only way to ensure success. Identifying the problems you’re trying to solve is what allows you to make informed decisions about what to change. Knowing what needs to change leads you to the path of least resistance. And following that path is how companies grow.
With these principles in mind, your rebranding efforts are much more likely to succeed.
Rebranding Pepperweb
When the time came for us to revisit our own branding, we knew it would take more than a logo change to reflect how far we’ve come as a company.
When we built the original Pepperweb site, our portfolio and services were still developing, and more importantly we were facing a very different industry landscape than the one we see today.
Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed huge changes in the expectations and goals of our clients, and we’ve adjusted our offerings accordingly.
We stay on the cutting edge of the latest in native and web technologies, mobile platforms, and marketing strategies, but our website failed to reflect that. Moreover, our visual identity no longer struck the ideal balance between approachability and polish that we wanted to portray.
These were the core problems we sought to resolve, and after months of hard work we’re incredibly proud to have launched our new website.
A New You
A rebrand is an adaptation. Not all companies will have to tackle one on such a large scale, but the underlying principles are the same no matter how large or small the business.
Being meticulous at every stage of the process is the only way to ensure success. Identifying the problems you’re trying to solve is what allows you to make informed decisions about what to change. Knowing what needs to change leads you to the path of least resistance. And following that path is how companies grow.
With these principles in mind, we can help ensure that your rebranding efforts will succeed.